


Day 15: Scars

by Aelaer



Series: Whumptober 2019 [15]
Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Analysis, Family Drama, Family Dynamics, Family Issues, Gen, Nebraska, whumptober2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-02 18:16:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21166028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aelaer/pseuds/Aelaer
Summary: Even Dad was impressed when he heard that Stephen wanted to be a doctor, after his initial freakout about him stealing Mom's supplies to learn sewing. "Doctors help a lot of people, and unlike teachers, you can make good money from it." He didn't really consider the money when he started, but that sounded like a pretty nice perk, and he really didn't want to be a teacher anyway. Donna wanted to be the teacher, and told Dad that she didn't care about the stupid money, anyway. He laughed and told her, "Okay," and the conversation ended.





	Day 15: Scars

Stephen got his first scar right on his inner wrist from before his memory got particularly good, because from what he knew, he always had it. Mom claimed that it was all Aunt Nancy's fault that he fell down in the first place, but Aunt Nancy was a rather tall and somewhat scary woman, so he never pursued it when he wondered about it and forgot the story when she was less scary and more annoying.

At age twelve, the scars were the remnants of hard play found on a farm in northern Nebraska. He was particularly impressed with the one on his knee that he got from a tree at school that he successfully climbed up but not so successfully climbed down. It was bleeding everywhere and it hurt so badly but at the same time it was really cool and he couldn't stop watching the doctors as they stitched him back up. He taught himself how to stitch after that, stealing Mom's supplies and trying to copy the stitches on his jeans and shirts, then Donna's stuffed animals, and then copying the ones he saw in a book from the library about surgeons and surgery.

Even Dad was impressed when he heard that he wanted to be a doctor, after his initial freakout about him stealing Mom's supplies to learn sewing. "Doctors help a lot of people, and unlike teachers, you can make good money from it." He didn't really consider the money when he started, but that sounded like a pretty nice perk, and he really didn't want to be a teacher anyway. Donna wanted to be the teacher, and told Dad that she didn't care about the stupid money, anyway. He laughed and told her, "Okay," and the conversation ended.

He worked throughout his junior and senior years to get all the money he needed to apply to universities all around the country. His physics teacher was a decent sort and pointed out all the best schools and where he could apply for grants and financial aid. He was on track to be valedictorian of his high school graduating class of a whopping size of 26 people, and that wasn't quite like a graduating class of 100 or 600 but it was still something.

Then he got accepted into Columbia University with a full ride scholarship. He freaked out. His principal freaked out. His physics teacher freaked out. One of them told the rest of the faculty in his school, and they all freaked out.

His parents also freaked out, but not in the same way as his principal and teacher.

"Columbia," Mom said with a light frown. "Isn't that in New York?"

"Yeah," he said.

"That's a bit far, Stephen," Mom said, and something deep within him twinged with hurt.

"Don't be daft, Beverly," Dad replied. "They're offering to pay for everything. He's gonna be gone for med school anyway after."

"There's a medical school at UNO," she replied. "Also ones at USD, DMU, and UMKC. And that hardly matters for undergrad; he can go to a school in Omaha or Lincoln, or maybe somewhere in South Dakota or Iowa."

"Yeah, but they're not paying for it," Dad argued.

Stephen decidedly did not tell them when he got a full ride scholarship to USD two weeks later.

Mom eventually accepted he was going to Columbia whether she liked it or not and didn't bring it up again for a long time.

* * *

At age nineteen, his most prominent scars were internal, written by the complete anguish and fury of his younger sister's death the summer after his first year of college. He should have known something was wrong when she didn't come up from the lake immediately. He should have known and pulled her from its depths faster, performed CPR faster, and Donna would still be alive and entering her senior year of high school and figuring out where she wanted to go to college to become an elementary school teacher.

But Donna was dead. Dead, drowned Donna.

His parents never said they blamed him, but Stephen knew that they did, because he was the one studying to become a doctor and he had failed to see the signs and rescue her fast enough. Of course they blamed him.

Two weeks after they buried Donna, he couldn't stand it anymore and rescheduled his flight back to New York for that weekend. If his parents couldn't take him, he'd call for a shuttle. He didn't want to spend the money he earned tutoring on things like shuttles, but he'd rather do that than spend any more time in that house.

Two days before his flight, his parents called him down to the kitchen. Dad was holding a beer; he spent the last two weeks holding a beer.

"Stephen," Mom started, clinging her hands together. "We'd like to talk with you."

An ominous feeling settled in the depths of his gut. "About?"

"Sit down," Dad said, voice gruff with grief, and he did so.

"It's been—" Mom's voice stopped, and she cleared her throat. "It's been a very, very hard summer, Stephen. The worst four weeks of my life." He nodded in agreement, and waited patiently as Mom got a hold of her emotions again. "It's— it's a reminder to us, how— how life can change in an instant. How little time we actually have. And, and Stevie—" He froze at the nickname; she rarely used it, per his request some several years ago, and when it slipped out he often did not like what she had to say next. "We see you so rarely. You're so far."

Stephen cleared his throat. "I visit during Christmas. I made Easter, too."

Mom shook her head. "That's not enough, not when it can—" She swallowed and heaved a shuddering breath.

"What your mother is trying to say," said Dad, "is that we want you to transfer to somewhere closer. Omaha, Lincoln, South Dakota, maybe even Des Moines or Kansas City, though the first three are preferable."

He stared at them. "You want me to transfer and pay thousands of dollars to go to a worse school?"

"They're all fine schools," Dad argued. "And— don't worry about costs. We'll handle that."

"With _what_ money?" he asked, incredulous.

"Don't worry about it," he repeated, more strongly this time and in a tone that demanded respect. Stephen considered arguing, anyway, but Dad continued onward before he could. "The money's beside the point, anyway. The school's are a bit far to drive to every day, but you can come home on the weekends."

"You're asking me to throw away the opportunities a place like Columbia University can give me for— for what? To make yourselves feel better?"

"Stephen!" Dad shouted.

Mom put a hand on Dad's arm. "Eugene," she murmured, then looked back at him. "Family is all we have, Stephen."

"Family is all _you_ have," he argued. "I have a future, a career waiting for me beyond all this. And I'm not going to kill _my_ future just because Donna's dead!"

That stunned them into silence. He could tell Dad was furious, too. He continued before he could lose his nerve. "And I've already booked a flight to go back to New York on Saturday. I'm going to the airport whether you drive me or not." He stood up and ignored Dad's angry shout at his back, and he left the house to walk for a while.

Late Friday night, Mom came to his room and asked him quietly, "What time do you need to be at the airport?"

He ignored the pang of guilt in his heart at her voice. "By noon."

"We'll leave at ten," she said, and he nodded and she left without saying good night.

The next morning she drove him to Eppley Airfield in Omaha. The ride was silent and Stephen tried to banish the silence by reading one of his textbooks.

About five minutes away from the airport, Mom asked, "Are you sure about this, Stephen?"

He couldn't look at her. "I'm sure," he muttered at the window.

She told him, "Be safe," and he nodded and the conversation ended.

* * *

The scars on his heart began to harden as they took on layers. More came that Christmas, when, against his better judgement, he agreed to his mother's pleas to visit over the holiday. She asked him to stay the whole winter break, but he lied and said he had an intersession class in January and could only stay a week. He didn't want to have to reschedule for his own sanity; he wasn't sure if he could handle his mother's disappointment if he did.

She was still disappointed, but over Christmas, the disappointment was largely overwhelmed by the grief of the first Christmas without Donna. None of them attempted to really change the atmosphere, beyond his mother's half-hearted results the first two days he was back in Nebraska. But it was too difficult an illusion to continue with his sister's spectre haunting every room, every tradition, and every memory.

His father was drinking a six-pack a day throughout his time there. From what he could see, this was business as usual.

Stephen only approached him on the subject the day after Christmas. "You're going to kill your liver at the rate you're drinking those."

"It's my liver to kill," his father replied.

He fell to silence and left the matter alone after that.

When he got back to New York and the faculty was back at Columbia, he talked with his advisor on taking a full summer course and any intersession courses available to cut his already fast-tracked graduation date of three and a half years down to three.

After he told his mother that he was staying in New York over the summer to graduate even earlier than planned, her weekly calls became bi-monthly, and slowly petered out to once a month by the time he graduated.

Throughout the rest of undergrad, he never went back to Nebraska.

* * *

After graduating, he spent a year working in a laboratory as he applied for as many schools with a combined MD-PhD program as he could afford. By the end of that year, he was back at Columbia within their rigorous program.

He completed it in a new record time. His advisors called him a prodigy. One told him that if his research continued down this new, innovative path, that he may yet change the field of neurosurgery. He didn't outright say Nobel Prize, but he didn't have to.

He entered his residency at the Columbia-affiliated New York-Presbyterian Hospital while still in his mid-twenties, on track to being a full-fledged neurosurgeon in his early thirties.

The monthly calls from his mother were no longer monthly. He didn't remember the last time he talked to his father.

Not too long after he turned thirty, he got a call in between shifts from his parents' landline (as they really didn't do cellphones; the service out on the farm was apparently terrible). He answered, "Hello mother," trying to keep as polite and patient as he was able.

"Not her," came the gravelly voice of his father, and he sounded awful. "But it's about her."

"What?" Stephen straightened in his seat. "What is it?"

His father didn't say anything for a moment, then: "She's got ovarian cancer. Stage four."

Oh God. "Where is she?"

"Overnight in Omaha. I'm driving back down early tomorrow." Another pause. "Your mom wants to see you."

He swallowed. "I'll— I'll see what I can do."

And he did. Residents didn't get that much time off, but Stephen hadn't taken a day off barring a horrible flu two years ago. He was permitted a couple days leave, and at the encouragement of a fellow resident by the name of Christine, asked for a few days around Christmas as well. He was granted them.

It wasn't a very happy Christmas, but his mother seemed genuinely pleased to see him, and he did his best to keep his spirits high around her, even as his father silently drank nearby.

On Christmas Eve, he found her thumbing a card when she thought he was not looking. Stephen later picked it up and found it was a Christmas card made by him when he was seven-years-old, signed by both him and Donna's childish signatures, and addressed to Mom and Dad.

He realized he did not remember when they stopped being Mom and Dad.

* * *

Beverly Strange died in the autumn of the following year. After her funeral, he did not return to Nebraska until his father passed away two years later from liver failure.

The service was small and their assets easily determined his. For some reason, he did not immediately put the farm up for sale the moment it became his.

As his paycheck steadily increased, he paid for the farm's upkeep and for someone to maintain it, but as the idea of selling or even leasing it entered his mind, he pushed it away for another day until the maintenance just became a monthly automatic payment that left his account. It eventually stopped entering his thoughts at all.

The scars on his heart remained. Christine, fellow-resident-now-fellow-doctor, tried to chip away at it, and she was partially successful in a way that few were. But even she could only do so much and her efforts eventually fell to the wayside.

Ten years after his mother's death, the most prominent of his scars to the naked eye were the blatant lines crossing both of his malformed hands.

But they were far from the first.

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to write a short thing about his hands. The characters rebelled and did something else.
> 
> I know a brother, Victor, exists, but I honestly have no idea how to incorporate him into MCU Stephen's life, so he's just… not mentioned. Sorry Victor.
> 
> I presumed that, like most schools in California, that the unis in the Midwest are referred to by their acronyms. If I'm incorrect, please let me know!
> 
> College acronyms:  
UNO = University of Nebraska Omaha  
USD = University of South Dakota  
DMU = Des Moines University  
UMKC = University of Missouri, Kansas City
> 
> For those unfamiliar with American slang, a "full ride scholarship" straight out of high school means that the university is paying for your tuition, all educational supplies, and often boarding for all four years. While universities often give grants for parts of education based on both merit and financial need (ranging from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the university), full rides are much rarer and to the top universities in the country, even moreso.
> 
> To put this in perspective, I have a real life example: one of my friends in high school was valedictorian of a graduating class of 600. Her merit plus her family's very poor financial status got her a full ride to Stanford. The tuition alone to Stanford (a private, world-famous university) is $50,000; with housing and supplies, it's closer to $60,000 a year. She got all of that paid by the university (yeah, these private universities have a stupid amount of money). She worked her ass off for that scholarship, though. I think she also became a medical doctor, funny enough. But anyway, I imagine Stephen getting something similar as, along with the majority of families in the US being completely unable to afford private university's astronomical costs, Nebraska's cost of living is nothing compared to New York's — wasn't in the 90's, and it's probably a larger gap now. So combined merit/financial-based scholarships for such schools are pretty common.


End file.
